On 12 September 1859, Thomas Alexander Kidd stood on Liverpool’s bustling docks with his family, ready to leave everything behind. The former merchant, magistrate and police commissioner had sold his comfortable life for steerage tickets to New Zealand.
Beside him waited his wife, Mary Agnes, and their six children—Eliza, Georgina, Mary, Helen, Frances and young James. They were joined by Annabella McCormick, their servant, and James Faughey, a trusted employee. Together, they would board the Shalimar for the three-month voyage to Auckland.
But not everyone boarding the Shalimar that day was travelling with their family.
Among the cabin passengers was Charles Aaron Allott, a 29-year-old Sheffield man. Behind him, he left his pregnant wife Mary, a toddler son he’d given to his mother to raise, and a marriage destroyed by scandal and venereal disease.
Mary would wait forty-seven years for his death to free her from their ‘improper marriage‘.
This is the story of his voyage—and her endurance.
The Shalimar: A Floating Village
The Shalimar towered above them. At over 1,400 tons, she was the largest vessel yet sent to New Zealand, her three masts reaching skyward like cathedral spires. Under Captain J W Brown’s command, she would carry 214 souls across three oceans.
Her passengers included a few cabin travellers like Charles Allott, professionals seeking their fortune, and steerage families like the Kidds, gambling everything on a new beginning.
At half-past six o’clock, a tugboat guided the great ship down the Mersey. By dawn the next day, they were under full sail. What lay ahead was 101 days at sea—a journey that would test their endurance, forge unexpected bonds and prepare them to become colonial pioneers.
The First Trial: Surviving the Atlantic
The romance of departure quickly gave way to harsh reality as the Shalimar hit the notorious Bay of Biscay. Sixteen-year-old Georgina Kidd, whose diary provides one of our windows into shipboard life, wrote on 13 September: ‘very sick’. Below decks was chaos. Crockery slid across tables, footwear moved from one side of the room to the other and helpless passengers groaned in their berths as the ship pitched violently.
Yet even in misery, the human spirit adapted. Thomas Kidd set about making their quarters livable. He screwed ledges to tables to keep dishes in place and installed a shelf above their cabin window for boots and shoes. Mary Agnes hung lace curtains on their three small windows, transforming their cramped space into something resembling a home.
The monotony was broken by encounters with other ships. Vessels appeared like mirages on the horizon: the Henry Moore bound for Calcutta, the Surrey carrying hopefuls to Melbourne’s goldfields and a Dutch ship that raised its colours in greeting. On 20 September, Thomas recorded in his diary: ‘Eight Vessels in sight from Quarter Deck & Three more from masthead’. Each sighting sparked speculation and stories, connecting the Shalimar’s passengers to the broader world of global migration.
Life Between the Masts: Creating Community
As seasickness retreated, the Shalimar transformed from a mere ship into a floating village. Mornings began with sailors scrubbing the decks with holystones—soft sandstone blocks. On ‘airing days’, mattresses draped over every available surface, prompting Georgina to observe that the ship looked ‘more like a fair’.
Washing days were tumultuous. Georgina described the scene: ‘The deck presented the appearance of a street in some little out of the way village, washing tubs afloat, baker hurrying backwards and forwards, joiner busy at work, some people sitting and sewing and lots of children and babies about’.
Food became both a comfort and a source of complaint. The ship’s fare included salt beef that Thomas observed was ‘more bone than meat’, ship’s biscuit that failed to meet his standards and occasional luxuries like preserved salmon. The crew also caught fresh food—sea turtles for Sunday soup, dolphins and bonito for the table. Once they dissected a shark, to the children’s horrified fascination.
Thomas noted with pleasure: ‘We have had regular baking of Soda Bread & succeeded wonderfully well both with the plain & sweet cakes’. These small victories mattered deeply. Each successful loaf connected them to home and proved their ability to adapt.
The Social Whirl: Romance, Rivalry and Recreation
Onboard, a complex social world developed. The Kidd girls befriended the Wyatt sisters, whilst adults navigated shipboard hierarchies. Class distinctions persisted in subtle ways—who dined at the captain’s table, whose children played together, who claimed the best deck spots in fair weather.
Entertainment helped maintain sanity. A cabin passenger, Mr Guly, offered French and German lessons. There were debates and musical evenings featuring piano, violin and concertina. Others staged ambitious theatrical productions of Hamlet and Othello. ‘Black Sam the cook’ performed the recently published ‘Old Folks at Home’, and Georgina wrote of his song and dance: ‘I believe he did it very well indeed’.
Romance bloomed in October when Mr Wyly married Miss Swift, with Captain Brown officiating. Thomas dryly noted the ceremony featured ”The Feast of & the Flow of Soul’ being witnessed by many from the Saloon who heard all the Edifying Speeches usual on such occasions’.
Close quarters also bred conflict. The Kidds suffered when their dog Gypsy was condemned as mad. Charles Allott threw the animal overboard, with Thomas’s reluctant agreement, after other passengers insisted.
According to a diary kept by Thomas, Charles had his own romantic entanglement during the voyage. One entry noted: ‘Mrs Daglish reported to have taken Mr Allott to task today for ceasing his attentions to her Daughter Jane Anna whose heart is nearly broken by his neglect of her’.
Whilst Charles dallied on the Shalimar, his wife Mary laboured at home. On 19 September 1859, seven days after the ship sailed, she gave birth to their daughter Sarah Laura—now’improperly married’ with her son already taken from her care.
Tropical Trials
October brought tropical challenges. The heat became oppressive, especially for women in their proper Victorian dress. Mary Agnes wilted and took calomel—a toxic mercury compound then considered medicine. Young Georgina cooled off by abandoning her ‘flannel drawers and vest’.
Disease haunted the steerage quarters. Despite having a ship’s doctor—whom Thomas called ‘useless & good for nothing. The laziest man I ever saw’—infant diarrhoea claimed young lives. The sound of small bodies being committed to the deep must have been a horror.
Yet the tropics brought wonders too. Georgina compared the skies to ‘a painted feathery sky on fine porcelain vases’. Flying fish skittered across the bow, zebra fish flashed in the wake and sperm whales appeared—though Thomas admitted disappointment when viewing them through his spyglass, writing: ‘Poor show they made for whales’.
Crossing the equator on 19 October proved anticlimactic. Instead of Neptune’s traditional rough baptism, the crew merely paraded in a donkey costume. Georgina noted disappointedly: ‘No larks got played at all’. Still, passengers marked the moment with prayer and Madeira, toasting their passage into the Southern Hemisphere.
The Long Southern Passage
November brought the Southern Ocean’s legendary storms. Thomas described seas where ‘the tops of all the waves being blown off in foam’. The ship flew before these winds at fifteen knots—thrilling speed for the passengers eager to start their new life.
New birds accompanied them. Albatrosses with ten-foot wingspans wheeled behind the ship. When the Chief Officer caught one, he gave the wings to Mary Agnes, who probably used the feathers for hat decoration. Cape hens, mollymawks and petrels became familiar sights.
Captain Brown kept spirits up with pranks. On Halloween, he and the first mate woke passengers, claiming a mail ship was nearby, urging them to write letters quickly. The hoax ended with the passengers drinking to the captain’s wedding anniversary. One passenger had even put on his hat, taken his stick and carpet bag and was determined to go back!
Land at Last
By late November, bets were placed about reaching Auckland before Christmas. The crew prepared by painting the captain’s gig, testing the anchors and scraping barnacles off the hull. On 7 December, Cape Otway appeared—Australia at last. They navigated the Bass Strait, then faced the notorious Tasman Sea.
Finally, on 17 December, the Three Kings Islands appeared. Five days later, after 101 days at sea, the Shalimar anchored at Rangitoto, the volcanic island near Auckland.
Māori canoes surrounded the ship, trading potatoes and fruit. The Kidd children delighted in fresh bananas and cherries after months of preserved food.
Leaving the Shalimar proved surprisingly emotional. Georgina wept saying goodbye to Captain Brown and Chief Officer Cameron, who had become like family. ‘I never had such an idle three months in my life’, she reflected, ‘and suppose I never shall again’.
Their temporary home—a wooden house near Auckland’s Mount Eden windmill—felt both strange and inviting after the ship’s constant motion. They spent Christmas Day on solid ground, eager to begin their new life.
The Wife Left Behind
Whilst Charles Allott eventually settled in Australia and the Kidds built their new lives in New Zealand, Mary remained in Sheffield, trapped in a marriage that existed only on paper.
She couldn’t divorce Charles. Under the recent Divorce Act of 1857, a wife needed to prove adultery PLUS either cruelty, desertion, incest or bestiality. When Mary finally petitioned for divorce in 1873, her case failed on a technicality: Charles hadn’t ‘deserted’ her completely because they’d occasionally crossed paths when she visited their son at his grandmother’s house.
The judge blamed Mary. ‘He could not attend to his business because his wife would not attend to him’, Judge Sir James Hannen declared. ‘He got to be late in the morning and got the sack’.
A husband’s venereal disease, his use of prostitutes, his abandonment of a pregnant wife—all became the wife’s fault for failing to ‘attend to’ him properly.
Mary remained at her parents home, smarried and trapped.
She was one of thousands of ‘improperly married‘ Victorian women—legally wed but functionally abandoned, unable to divorce, remarry, or build independent lives.
In 1860, Mary began keeping a personal book of receipts (Victorian recipes, personal and household care and recipes for the sick). Over fifty years, she filled it with over 280 recipes: Madeira cakes, seed cakes, rolled gingerbread, elderflower wine, raspberry vinegar, furniture polish, stove blacking, and household remedies.
The Shalimar sailed for New Zealand with Charles Allott aboard. Mary: A Victorian Life Recovered is the story of the wife it left behind.
Days from giving birth, her firstborn son already taken from her, Mary began a recipe book the following year. Her life is now told across three books: a facsimile of that recipe book (already published), the biography Neither Wife Nor Widow: The Life of an Abandoned Wife in Victorian England, and a companion volume, Interpreting Mary’s Recipe Book, on the Victorian household that produced it. Together they follow her from abandonment to survival, reading its more than 280 recipes and household entries as evidence of competence, proof of belonging, and a record of a life remade.
The prelaunch page is live on Kickstarter now. Follow it to be the first to know the moment the campaign opens: Follow Mary: A Victorian Life Recovered on Kickstarter →
A Recipe from Mary’s Book: Madeira Cake
This is the first cake recipe Mary recorded in her book, copied from Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845). It would have been a cake for special occasions—Sunday dinner or afternoon tea with visitors.
Madeira Cake
Ingredients:
- 4 fresh eggs
- 6 oz (170g) caster sugar, sifted
- 6 oz (170g) plain flour
- 4 oz (115g) butter, melted but not hot
- Rind of 1 fresh lemon, finely grated
- ⅓ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
- Optional: Candied citron peel, finely chopped
Method:
- Preheat your oven to 180°C (350°F/Gas Mark 4). Grease and line a loaf tin.
- Whisk the eggs until very light and frothy (about 10-15 minutes by hand, or 5 minutes with an electric mixer).
- Gradually add the sugar whilst continuing to whisk.
- Gently fold in the flour.
- Fold in the melted butter (ensure it’s liquid but not hot) and lemon rind.
- Just before pouring into the tin, beat in the bicarbonate of soda.
- Pour into the prepared tin and bake for 50-60 minutes until a skewer inserted comes out clean.
- Cool in the tin for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack.
Mary’s note: ‘Bake one hour in a moderate oven. Candied citron may be added.’
Every time Mary baked this cake successfully in her mother’s kitchen, she proved her domestic competence, a silent protest that her husband’s failures were not her fault.
Each carefully recorded recipe was proof of competence. Each attributed recipe—’Mrs George Eadon’s Elderflower Wine’, ‘Mrs John Bunting’s Raspberry Vinegar’, ‘Mrs A Allott’s Ginger Wine’ (from Charles’s mother)—documented Mary’s network of women who sustained her through scandal, gossip and abandonment.
The recipe book became Mary’s silent testimony: I am competent. I am connected. I am worthy of respect.
It was 1906 before Charles died in Australia, finally freeing Mary from forty-seven years of ‘improper marriage’. At 71, she married widower James Parker. I hope she finally found the peaceful, companionable happiness she’d been denied.
Epilogue
The Kidd diaries preserve more than a travelogue. They capture an era when ordinary families risked everything for distant shores. Their story—of seasickness conquered, friendships forged, losses endured and wonders witnessed—represents thousands of similar voyages around the empire.
But behind every emigrant story lies another story: the families left behind.
For every Charles Allott who sailed away, there was a Mary who stayed—raising children alone, fighting legal battles, building lives from fragments, surviving.
The Shalimar’s voyage, recorded by Thomas and his daughter Georgina in fading ink, reminds us that behind the grand narratives of empire lie intimate human stories. Of families who ate hard biscuits and learned to bear the heat. Who buried children at sea and danced under moonlight. Who complained about the food yet marvelled at new sights.
And of the women who stayed behind, waiting, enduring, creating lives worth living within the constraints Victorian law imposed upon them.
Bibliography
Shipboard Journal of Georgina Kidd as transcribed by R Lugton
Shipboard diary of Thomas Kidd as transcribed by four of his great-grandchildren.
With grateful thanks to Carolyn McKenzie
I’m telling Mary’s complete story in The Recipe Book That Sustained a Life: Mary Allott’s Victorian Story of Abandonment, Scandal, and Survival. Join the waitlist for early access.
Helen Parker-Drabble is an author and ‘geneatherapist‘ who combines genealogical research with psychological insights to understand how historical events shaped our ancestors.